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The Khashoggi Murder
At 1:14 p.m. on Tuesday, October 2, 2018, the Saudi journalist and *Washington Post* columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate at 4 Saadabad Caddesi in the Levent district of Istanbul. He was 59 years old. He had an appointment to collect divorce papers he needed for his upcoming marriage to his fiancée Hatice Cengiz, who waited outside in his car. He never came out. A 15-man Saudi operational team had flown into Istanbul on private jets earlier the same day on two separate flights. The team included Saudi intelligence officers, military personnel, and a forensic pathologist named Salah Mohammed al-Tubaigy who specialized in autopsies and had brought a portable bone saw. Within approximately seven minutes of Khashoggi's arrival at the consulate, he was killed. His body was dismembered. The dismembered parts were carried out of the consulate in suitcases. The body has never been recovered. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's classified assessment, completed in November 2018, concluded with 'medium-to-high confidence' that the operation had been ordered personally by Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia (commonly known as MBS). The Trump administration declined to release the assessment publicly. The Biden administration released a four-page unclassified version on February 26, 2021. Saudi Arabia conducted its own closed-court trial in 2019 that convicted eight Saudi nationals; five received initial death sentences subsequently commuted to twenty-year prison terms after pardons from Khashoggi's sons. The Saudi narrative — that the operation was an unauthorized rogue action by intelligence officers acting without MBS's knowledge — has been substantially contradicted by the U.S. intelligence assessment, by the Turkish forensic and audio evidence, and by the operational logistics that would not have been possible without senior authorization. As of mid-2026, MBS is the de facto and de jure ruler of Saudi Arabia.
The Pentagon Papers
In October 1969, a Defense Department analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica began making photocopies of a 7,000-page classified history of the Vietnam War. He worked nights, with a single accomplice. He took the documents home in stages. He photocopied them on a commercial Xerox machine that his daughter, age 13, helped him operate. Twenty-one months later, the New York Times began publishing them. The Nixon White House obtained the first prior-restraint injunction against an American newspaper in 154 years. The Supreme Court overturned it within fifteen days. The same White House unit set up to stop Daniel Ellsberg from leaking anything else became, eight months later, the unit that broke into the Democratic National Committee at Watergate.
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